Siddhartha Mukerjee: The Emperor of All Maladies

Best read when neither you nor anyone close to you has cancer, and so you can enjoy the story dispassionately, this is really good read. If only it were fiction. It's a biography of an enemy, its first appearances, its identification, and then the millennia-long human quest to find ways to kill it -- a story of knife-attacks, poisoning, irradiation, prevention, and now the subtle mapping of proteins and pathways in the cell, and the design of exquisitely shaped molecules to block them.

It's also a human story of politics, hubris, self-experimentation, and luck, all lashed into a froth by the deadly urgency of the task.

The author, himself a cancer doctor who clearly rides the rough road alongside his patients, left me with two conclusions.

First, like driving terrorists out of a city, cancer is being pushed back, block by block, though with many casualties. Survival rates increased by one percent per year for many years from the mid-1990s. No magic bullet here, then, just the patient accumulation of fine medicine.

Second, though, cancer does what living things do: multiply, mutate, adapt, innovate, fight on, refuse to die. Its strengths are life's strengths. In cancer, it's as if our own life-force slips its bonds and turns on us. Surveying current medical horizons, this book suggests that we may largely conquer cancer in the sense that perhaps one day few people will die young of it; but it will conquer us in that, in old age, even when everything else can be healed, it will be waiting for us.

My only criticism? One gets the impression that only in the United States has anyone fought cancer at all, with that collectivity of wusses known as 'Europe' just throwing in some not-much-needed logistical help now and again -- rather like the Iraq war.

Pulitzer prizes (unlike, in my view, many other prizes) are a reliable indicator of a good book. This super book puts all the dread things we see when people enter cancer wards--the chemo, the surgery, the remissions --into their proper places within a coherent, constantly interesting and rather gripping account.

David Lloyd: Teach yourself small business accounting

Dead simple, comprehensive, believable and jargon-free, I found this book empowering and freeing. Bases all your accounting on your monthly business bank statement, perfect for small business owners who'd rather be doing something else but want to stay legal and in control.

The complete idiots' guide to time management

An unlikely Good Read, it coincided with me discovering mortality. I think I picked it up as a busy and ambitious bloke with wide opportunities* opening up in the world of publishing and in the organization I worked for. And not enough time to fit everything in.

I read it after a near-fatal heart disease that left me, in my mid-thirties, disabled, off work for three months, banned from going out in the evenings, waking up with severe heart pains and every time I looked at my four-year-old son and my six-year-old daughter, thinking I was going to die.

I didn't die. I have lived to see my kids become bigger and wiser than me. But I did learn that 'time management' is not about packing as much into life as possible, but taking out as much out as possible -- everything that, in the final analysis, doesn't really matter. I loved this book.




*in my little world at least

French women don't get fat: Mireille Guiliano

'Nothing is sinfully delicious. If you really adore something, as I adore chocolate, there is a place for it in your life. But we cannot allow guilt-ridden scarfing. Only with cultivated pleasure can you enjoy chocolate in the clear light of day.'

I've been driving my family mad with references to this book which can summed up as: knowing your enemies, drinking lots of water and champagne, and relishing fresh, in-season food in small portions.

I don't know what 'scarfing' means but plan to use it sometime.

The end of poverty: Jeffrey Sachs

Here's the opening quote:

This book is about ending poverty in our time. It is not a forecast ... Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty by the year 2025.

We live in amazing days: Nigeria, for example, now has no foreign debt, through a combination of political reform and debt forgiveness (and a high oil price). Debt forgiveness would not have happened without the Christian Church's contribution -- a story that perhaps will rank one day with the Christian contribution to the ending of slavery. This marvellous, clear-headed, optimistic and prophetic book is essential reading to shape our responses to poverty, aid, debt and trade.